Law enforcementDivided Supreme Court allows collection of DNA samples from suspects upon arrest

The Supreme Court on Monday, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that law enforcement is now allowed to take samples of DNA from people who have been arrested on suspicion of committing a serious crime.

The majority on the court said the DNA sample test was necessary to confirm the identity of a suspect in custody.

“When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

The New York Times reports that Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that the swabbing procedure was a search under the fourth amendment that had to be justified as reasonable under the circumstances. Kennedy wrote that the search was reasonable as a result of “the need for law enforcement officers in a safe and accurate way to process and identify the persons and possessions they must take into custody.”

Such identification, Kennedy wrote, “is no different than matching an arrestee’s face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect; or matching tattoos to known gang members to reveal a criminal affiliation; or matching the arrestee’s fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene.”

Justice Antonin Scalia did not hide his deep disagreement with the majority opinion (in a rare move, he summarized his dissent from the bench).He said that the point of DNA testing is to attempt to solve cold cases, not to identify a suspect in custody.

“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” Justice Scalia said.

Monday’s ruling, Maryland v. King, No. 12-207, arose from the collection of DNA in 2009 from Alonzo Jay King Jr. after he was arrested on assault charges in Wicomico County, Maryland.

Scalia wrote that King’s identification was not the point of the DNA collection. King’s identification was well established when he was arrested on the assault charge because local authorities had his name, race, sex, height, weight, date of birth, and address.

Scalia also wrote that the law did authorize testing for identification purposes, but that that law was meant to help in tracking or identifying missing people and human remains, not for identifying people who have been arrested.

“Solving crimes is a noble objective,” Scalia concluded, “but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail.” 

Scalia has been a strong supporter of Fourth Amendment rights. This term he has joined with the liberal judges on the bench to limit the use of drug-sniffing dogs outside homes and restrict the collection of blood in drunk-driving investigations.

Before Monday’s ruling, the federal government, along with twenty-eight states, allowed the collection of DNA evidence upon an arrest. Law enforcement officials say collecting DNA is a valuable method for solving cold crimes.

In the King case, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that a law authorizing the collecting of DNA evidence from people who have been arrested but not convicted violated the Fourth Amendment.